Paul Wolfowitz says he’s sorry, which is a good first step. A good second step would be resigning. He’s not six years old and the World Bank isn’t kindergarden playtime. I’m sure he is sorry. Still, “should you engage in corruption on behalf of your girlfriend while leading an international anti-corruption campaign?” isn’t one of the world’s more difficult questions. There are plenty of other people out there who could do the job and it would send a good message to get rid of him.

The single least-controversial thing you can say about foreign aid and third-world development, is that it’s really, really helpful for the developing nation you’re trying to help out to become less corrupt. Since the World Bank is supposed to boost third-world development, one important focus of its mission must be improving developing world governance. Thus, it’s a really bad idea for the head of the World Bank to be caught ordering his subordinates to give his girlfriend a $50k / year raise and then get away with it.

I was considering writing a sentence here that began “if the Bush administration cares at all about . . . ” but that’s obviously a non-starter. The question is what leverage to congressional Democrats have that might help shove Wolfowitz out the door.

See Beutler and Klein for some critiques of Brooks on McCain. Let me add my own. Brooks writes that McCain thinks “he has an obligation to seek victory as long as there is any chance of it.” One hears this sort of thing now and again, and it’s worth pointing out that it involves a pretty perverse moral calculus. If we should prefer any option that holds out any chance of “victory,” no matter how high the price of that option or how small the odds of success, then the McCain doctrine must hold that the costs of defeat in Iraq are literally infinite.

That, of course, is absurd. Nations sometimes really do find themselves in wars where their survival qua nation is imperiled. They also sometimes find themselves in situations where the price of defeat will be the literal eradication of the population. Iraq, however, is not anything like either of those cases. What’s more, it so obviously doesn’t fit either of those models that one gets the sense that McCain, “the candidate who is the most substantive, most mature and most consistent,” hasn’t genuinely given any thought whatsoever to the strategic stakes in Iraq or the nature and purpose of America’s overall policy in the region.

Laura Rozen went to the Middle East to investigate reports of covert Israeli operations in Kurdistan and found something a bit different:

Instead of Michaels being part of a covert operation to set up anti-Iranian proxies in Kurdish Iraq, I discovered that Michaels and his associates were part of an effort by the Kurds and their allies to lobby the West for greater power in Iraq, and greater clout in Washington, and at the same time, by a group of Israeli ex security officials to rekindle good relations with their historical allies the Kurds through joint infrastructure, economic development, and security projects. It was, in other words, a story about influence-building, buying, and profit, albeit with subplots that were equal parts John le Carre and Keystone Kops, and a cast of characters ranging from ex-Mossad head Yatom to a former German superspy, with Israeli counterterrorism commandos, Kurdish political dynasties, powerful American lobbyists, Turkish business tycoons thrown in—not to mention millions of dollars stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

Read the whole thing.

The thing about a bomb attack on the Iraqi parliament is that it’s really hard to see how you conduct on operation like that inside the Green Zone without it being the proverbial inside job. The insurgents also destroyed a bridge and I believe Spencer has thoughts on the significance of this (it relates to the fact that there simply aren’t many bridges across the Tigris) so I’m awaiting updates in his cyberspace.

Two different attacks both of which indicate a qualitative leap in insurgent capabilities or intentions over what we’ve seen over the past four years of combat does not, to me, suggest an insurgency that’s in its last throes or a “surge” that just needs more time to succeed.

UPDATE: Here’s your Ackerlink — check it out.

This is a really fascinating account of newly surfaced paperwork about Iraqi civilians’ claims against the US military and how those claims were handled. For example, “in 2005, an American soldier in a dangerous Sunni Arab area south of Baghdad killed a boy after mistaking his book bag for a bomb satchel. The Army paid the boy’s uncle $500.” A total of $32 million has been paid out to Iraqi and Afghan civilians, though the process for determining who gets what seems highly arbitrary. And, of course, getting $500 because some foreigners decided to shoot and kill your nephew for the crime of carrying a book bag seems about as likely to prompt you to give money to the insurgency as it is to convince you that the Americans are your friends.